Life On Mars

I always thought that when I moved in here my grandmother and I would fight constantly. She would criticise me one too often times, and I would tell where it was at. She would badmouth my mother in front of me, and I would come clean about what we both thought of her. 53 years of abuse, the continual destruction of a woman’s self esteem, the persistent agony vented and forced upon everyone else, and a weight that is carried to this day. There would be tears; there would be screaming; and then the ambulance. I was sure she couldn’t resist picking and nagging, and I was sure I couldn’t hold my tongue.
But we got through it.
In fact we fight far less than my mother and I, granted we talk less too, and there’s a great deal more guarded pretentious formality. But it’s working. She’s cleared out a lot of space to have me here. It’s touching, you can see she’s made a lot of effort. She’s given me space in the cupboards to put my crockery, space in the pantry to put my food, space in the bathroom to put my toiletries. She lets me use her dishes, and she has this one pot that when you scrub it around and around, makes a sound like the TARDIS taking off. She even encouraged me to get up at my usual time of 12 in the afternoon, because in the beginning I was getting up uncharacteristically early.

But it hasn’t all been roses. I asked to use the phone late one night once and she said, “I don’t want to be sleeping while you are on the phone”, not “I can’t sleep if you are talking on the phone”, but “I don’t want to be sleeping while you are on the phone”. Indeed. I don’t care that if at times it seems like she is half deaf, or that at her age she ought to be. I’m still convinced that she can hear through walls if she wants to. She is craning to eavesdrop 24/7. I caught her listening at the door one night. I was talking to my mother in my room on the long phone extension, and I heard this flicking rustling noise outside the door. So I opened it, and there she was, shuffling a pack of cards with her ear pressed to the door, boy was she surprised! And guilty, she toddled off like nothing had even happened.
I caught her reading my computer screen the other day, I thought I was being paranoid turning it off every time I wasn’t near it. But the one time I didn’t, I came back and she was hunched over the keyboard peering into the screen. She’d even gotten her glasses to read the tiny print in my Word document. Thankfully it was one of my assignments, but unluckily enough it was for life writing, and so it was taken directly from the blog. I stumbled in with a “Wha-what are you doing?” and got something just as articulate that started with “I was just…”. How do you make excuses for an invasion of privacy like that? She was practically reading my diary.
She has forbidden me from cooking after 9 o’clock, which to some might seem like a ridiculous thing to have to ban, but to me it’s bloody inconvenient. I’m in the habit of having very late dinners. It has been this way for eighteen years, and I have grown accustomed to having my last meal of the night at about 10. If I eat at 7 o’clock like a normal person, come 9, before I go to bed, I am starving again. I won’t sleep. I’ll get up at eleven and gorge myself in front of the fridge. Sometimes this no cooking after nine has meant that I don’t get dinner, or that I get dinner at the cost of severely pissing her off.
She can’t understand how I do the dishes. She stares in wonderment and disbelief. She doesn’t like it one bit, that’s not how one is supposed to do the dishes. It is just not right, it does not compute. It scares her; that someone could be so far from her accepted norms and still continue to function. After about the fourth time I had to give her a full demonstration and explanation from start to finish. She didn’t want it, she thought it was ridiculous and spiteful and superfluous. She wasn’t going to listen. But I didn’t stop, I did the dishes and announced in a loud voice every single step. What was doing with the dishes, how I start, how I wash, how I rinse, how much water it uses, how I actually use less water than she does. And she couldn’t not listen. She hasn’t asked since. Honestly, the woman doesn’t know what she wants.
Sometimes when I come home my room isn’t mine anymore because it’s news hour. My room is the TV room, and at 7 o’clock the TV takes priority. She won’t even get up out of the chair to let me in the house if I arrive when the news is on.
The other day she cracked it over a ‘computer-desk-lamp’. She doesn’t like me using the ceiling light. To her the ceiling light is only there for emergencies, like when you lose something and need to search the floor for it. Seriously, that’s what she thinks. I like to use the ceiling light because the contrast between the computer screen and the room can be painful. You can’t sit in the dark with a 700 watt computer screen 8 inches from your face. It hurts. She used to have a standing-lamp in here. But when I put my things in here I asked her to get rid of it because I would clumsily knock it over. Truth was, I just plain didn’t like it. The other day the ceiling light burned out, and I knew I was in for it. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, the thing probably hadn’t been used for twenty years, it was on its way out anyway. But I knew I would get the blame. Replacing that light meant getting the handyman in, as it was under a huge, heavy glass shade. Her every look said “I told you so. This is what happens when you use lights”. One day she brought me into the kitchen with a very serious look on her face, the kind your parents get before they tell you they’ve just got a call from your school. She asked me if she could talk to me about something, she said it was ‘very important’. I braced for the worst, if I had a porn stash I would think that she’d found it. Instead she gave me a ridiculous ultimatum, I had to buy a proper ‘computer-desk-lamp’ today, or else. This ‘computer-desk-lamp’ was one hyphenated word and one singular object that would solve all my problems. It was the proper thing to have. The fact that I chose to use the ceiling light rather than a ‘computer-desk-lamp’ was reprehensible. I went shopping that day, and to my credit I did actually look at lamps. I felt like going up to a salesman and asking him for a ‘computer-desk-lamp’ just to tell her he said he didn’t know what the hell I was on about.
The biggest source of tension has been the bathroom. Not who gets to use it when, not who spends too long in there and what they might be doing. But the steam. The bathroom has a skylight. There is a big square shaft cut from the ceiling to the roof, with a plastic window at the end. It is winter and the cold air sits on the outside of that plastic. It is a steam magnet. That narrow shaft is the highest coldest point in the room. The condensation likes to adhere to the walls of it and drip the dust down in muddy streaks. She finds this horrific. I got on the ladder and cleaned it all for her. But this was not the end. The mere fact that there is steam on the mirror is an indication that her bathroom must be slowly rotting away. Recently I made the mistake of getting out of the bathroom the moment I turned off the shower, to answer the phone. The steam had not had a chance to clear, like it usually does when I mess about with my hair. She saw the steam at its peak and freaked out. “Do you think that bathroom is a sauna?!” she screamed. “No. It’s a bathroom.” I replied, in feigned bewilderment and calm passive-aggressive tones. Then she swore at me in Hungarian. I don’t know that many words, but by her tone, I would say it was something like “You better watch yourself you filthy brat,” which when asked, she translated to “You better take care with me.”
After this incident I resolved to only have showers when she wasn’t home, and take the rest when I was at uni. I almost had the resolve. But before all that was necessary; I discovered the ceiling fan. She never told me about it, it was never pointed out to me, and she never uses it. But regulation told me she must have one. In the warmer months at least, it completely extracts all the steam from the room. I had a peek under the bathroom door while she was in the shower once, and it was just as bad a steamy mess as I ever managed.

I have been secretly exploring her cupboards and pillaging her liquor. Rum is an evil drink. It tastes nothing like how it is with cream or pudding, or how it smells. The smell is exotic and enticing, like spiced fruit with a hint of something more dangerous. But it tastes like varnish and vanilla essence on the tongue. Then the devilish tease leaves you with that indescribable spiced fruit taste on your palate that you can never grab a hold of. Only the foolish drink of it again.


I love the trains. Trains are excellent. Trains are my freedom and my frustration. Huge hulking masses bigger than a house on wheels thundering along the track. They astound me for some reason. I remember when going through a tunnel used to give me the shivers as a kid, now I’m just begging for it to hurry up getting me home and into an area where there is mobile reception. That “Remember to validate your Metcard before you travel” thing gives me the Big Brother heebie-jeebies. As well as all that Connex rot. The “Thank you for travelling with Connex” ominous prelude freaks me out. I always think a disaster brief will follow this message. There was a closed broken glass door at a train station. I heard someone say “That’s just what they’re like here, walk right through a door before they’ll see it.” I get spun out by seeing these 30-something executives with their backpacks and iPods, and I hate the look of the girls walking by in those tights that make people look like they have a skin disease. I saw an Arg Barker driving a truck.


It often strikes me that it should feel unusual to be on my own, to be on my own here. Living for myself in the big bad city, being, buying, cooking, washing, travelling, doing – but I couldn’t imagine it any other way. I couldn’t imagine doing this with my mother by my side, or as part of another school trip, or with my grandmother hovering. Part of me thinks that it should be like that. That I have no right to be out here on my own, and that misfortune will befall me at the next turn due to this oversight. I can’t believe what my mother must think; it must be so weird and exulting to know her daughter is out here on her own. Yet to part of me this all feels incredibly right, like I have been doing this for 20 years. There exists in me both a diffident little girl and a self-assured and forceful woman.

Uni, or for that matter, life, is not ‘everything is alright in the end’, it’s about girls throwing up in the loo and halls that reek like boiled mushrooms. It’s real.
I have that pimple faced, greasy haired, slouchily dressed, malnourished unwashed student look about me, giving off a smell like sex without having actually got any. Which is gross I know, and not expressly true, but it just about sums up how I feel about myself.

This afternoon I went shopping. In search of Vitamin A since I’ve been burning out my retinas in front of the computer screen; and some ‘Executive Stress’ B formula, as this is exactly what I have been suffering from. They were playing jazz in the town square. Really good jazz too. And I just thought about the song and the lyrics and the day, and how I really ought to listen to more jazz; and something I said in a blog I never got to write really struck me: “It all got better when I turned the radio on.” I need music. I believe in music, and I believe in the odd prophecy. So when the two combined this morning and I woke up with the lyrics to Manchester Orchestra's song “I've Got Friends” in my head, thinking that the chorus went: “I've got friends in all the right places, I know what they want, and I know they would want me to stay” I took it as a bit of a sign. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the lyrics are actually “I've got friends in all the right places, I know what they want, and I know they don’t want me to stay”. But by the time I got around to actually looking them up, the message that “they would want me to stay” had already been plaguing me all day, and thoroughly persuaded me.
If I can’t do uni for myself, and if leaving is only going to cause a huge disturbance just to change things for me (maybe not even for the better), then the least I can do is stop being so selfish and do it for someone else. For my man because he’ll miss me at uni, and he wants me to stay, and we’ll miss being able to share that experience no matter how horrible. For my grandmother because she equates uni with righteousness and success, and she wants to continue to be proud of me and be able to tell her friends that I am studying. For my mother because in some small way it justifies me moving out; and the thought that I moved out only to get a job down here that I already had up there and could have continued to live with her in order to do – is too much. She is already falling to pieces without me. And she would have to go through an endless mound of paperwork in order to get me out of it. I do not know how she would cope.
And that’s the other thing: for the government. For the paperwork. For the money. Because there is a lot of it. Not that I couldn’t make it all myself working in a supermarket for less time than I spend on essays... but the government is paying, and that makes things a lot more relaxed financially. And also my family has spent a lot of money and effort on my living arrangements and things and I am locked into an internet contract.
For society, because people seem to think this is the right thing to do. And one hears of way more people saying ‘I wish I had gone to uni’ than ‘I wish I never wasted my time going to uni’.
For my tutors and lecturers now. Because I do not want to waste their time or disappoint them.
And for my teachers thus far. Because this is what they have been pushing me towards ever since I learnt to read, write and add up. Preparing me for high school to prepare me for year 12 to prepare me for uni to prepare me for… god knows what. I refuse to believe it was ‘life’.
This is part of the problem. I know not why I am here. And I have no purpose of my own to fall back on when my conviction waivers. So I will take my lead from those around me one last time; and stay.

I have been taking a lot of deep breaths. And not getting too stressed. It really does make even the simplest things in your life a joy by contrast to something as awful and stressful as uni.

The best moments are the moments that are my own. Being able to go, and just going into the heart of the city, is freeing. Walking down the street after shopping again listening to Fox FM a song comes on ‘Get Shaky’ by The Ian Carey Project. I love this song. It embodies all I felt uni was meant to be and hearing it almost makes it feel like it is.
I dance down the street with my heavy bags enjoying one complete moment of carefree independence in this crazy toxic world.
(song break)
Hearing that song again brings this all back to me. And holy fuck; there’s a smell. A proper ineffable nostalgic scent associated with this song and the memories it brings back. A scent as complex and indescribable as my first few days of high school: kids, pencils, new linoleum and freshly rained-on all-weather carpet, concrete and gum leaves. Except this is the smell of new plastic drawers, luggage, clothes from the second hand store, Melbourne air, school kids on a foreign bus, that first train ride in, new students and something else. Something else that really gets up my nose and down my throat into the pit of stomach and gives me a sound wrenching. The memory of that very walk home with the bags of shopping, the radio playing this, and going on to say how they had been doing university open day related gimmicks all week. All the first few weeks of my stay, my mother driving away, especially going shopping for the first time, the scent of the things I bought, the uni open day, the bad music blasting out, the last remnants of summer, finding an attractive male, feeling insecure, wanting to be free, things panning out better than expected – and finding the fun.

I still dislike uni. I do not know why I write so much about this damned subject. I hate it and I wish I could get over it, but not in the way you think. I detest it, and I resent it, and it’s talking over my life, but I am also aware that I am, for some stupendously stupid, perhaps even masochistic and ill-guided reason – happy. Alive, verbose, and sporadically inspired.